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	What’s Development’ with Rights Abuses along the Way? by Jessica Evans Human Rights Watch, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre   Sep 2013   Amnesty International’s statement for the UN Human Rights Council on the human rights impact of International Financial Institutions, such as the World Bank: 24th session of the Human Rights Council (9 to 27 September 2013)   The decisions, policies and projects promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs) have significant and often far-reaching impacts on human rights. While the impacts of these institutions can be positive - for example, contributing to poverty reduction - too often the impact is negative, with poor and marginalised individuals and communities suffering the most negative impacts.1 This is because these institutions frequently invest in industries, such as energy and resource extraction and projects, such as large-scale infrastructure development, associated with environmental damage and human rights abuses, like forced evictions. Also the projects that they support are frequently carried out in countries that may face significant challenges in ensuring the effective protection of human rights.   The organizations submitting this joint statement urge the United Nations Human Rights Council to increase its focus on the human rights impact of IFIs, including multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank.   While the obligation for the protection of human rights lies with the state, IFIs and their member states also have responsibilities to ensure that activities they support do not cause, or contribute to, human rights abuses by putting in place adequate safeguards. Many IFIs regard human rights as a political issue for states, and refuse to accept that they have, at a minimum, a responsibility to ensure respect for human rights in the activities they support. This is despite the fact that many IFIs are established and controlled by states, which have legal obligations under international and regional (and, in many cases, national) law to respect, protect and fulfill human rights.   http://reliefweb.int/report/world/amnesty-international%E2%80%99s-written-statement-un-human-rights-council-human-rights-impact http://reliefweb.int/organization/amnesty   May 2013   What’s Development with Rights Abuses along the Way?, by Jessica Evans. (Human Rights Watch)   A grandmother in Cambodia told me recently, “I just want you to know my story in case something happens and I am gone.” Police and government officials have threatened and harassed “Kunthea” for her protests against government agencies and appeals to the World Bank after she was forcibly evicted from her home by a private company. The World Bank’s involvement was through a land titling project which had not secured land rights for Kunthea or her neighbors. This is just one example of how the Bank’s activities can have an impact on human rights, but the Bank still insists that it has no obligation to ensure that its projects do not contribute to rights violations.   In April at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s 2013 spring meetings, the Bank introduced its new “vision,” in which it pledged to work toward eliminating extreme poverty and raising the income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. But the “vision” included no mention of rights. As several development and human rights organizations noted in a joint statement, this “vision” will be undermined if the World Bank doesn’t start recognizing the importance of human rights for its development work.   The groups were united in their call for the World Bank President, Jim Kim, to make a firm commitment to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights in all Bank activities. The United Nations special rapporteurs on extreme poverty, indigenous peoples, the right to food, and foreign debt have made a similar call. Human Rights Watch has also done so in its “Human Rights Agenda for the World Bank.”   The World Bank can minimize avoidable suffering, especially among marginalized, excluded, and vulnerable groups by doing a better job of protecting rights. This would only enhance the sustainability and impact of its development efforts.   The Bank hasn’t always been silent on the subject. Fifteen years ago, in fact, it recognized that “creating the conditions for attainment of human rights is a central and irreducible goal of development” and that “the world now accepts that sustainable development is impossible without human rights.”   The World Bank has legal obligations to respect and protect human rights, as an international organization and a UN specialized agency. Moreover, the Bank’s member countries have specific human rights obligations that they cannot abandon when they decide whether to approve Bank lending and projects.   Some parts of the Bank and some governments contend that talk of human rights is just politics. They say that to consider such issues would violate the Bank’s “non-political” mandate. But it should be obvious that the Bank’s mandate does not authorize it to participate in violating human rights. As the Bank said back in 1998, it “has always taken measures to ensure that human rights are fully respected in connection with the projects it supports.” In practice, though, the Bank’s safeguard policies are insufficient to protect human rights.   The Bank’s resistance to adhering to international human rights law sharply contrasts with its stand on international environmental law. The Bank says it won’t support lending to projects that violate relevant international environmental treaties and agreements. So why should it be silent on complying with human rights treaties? It should take the same approach to human rights law that it does to environmental law.   The absence of a clear commitment not to support any activities that will contribute to or exacerbate human rights violations leaves staff without guidance on how they should approach human rights concerns or what their responsibilities are. The result is unfettered discretion for staff to determine the extent to which they will consider risks to human rights and whether to do anything about them. In practice, Bank efforts to protect rights appear arbitrary, inconsistent, or even nonexistent, and the people these problems affect have little or no recourse for the harm they suffered.   Kunthea in Cambodia knows first-hand the consequences of the Bank’s failure to consider the human rights impacts of its projects. By committing to human rights in all of its activities and enshrining that commitment in its safeguards policies, the World Bank will not only do a better job of protecting human rights but also of fulfilling its mandate to reduce poverty.   * Jessica Evans is the senior advocate and researcher on international financial institutions at Human Rights Watch. http://www.hrw.org/news/list/41   May 2013   World Bank turns to hydropower to square development with climate change, by Howard Schneider. (Washington Post)   The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower projects around the globe, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.   Major hydropower projects in Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere — all of a scale dubbed “transformational” to the regions involved — are a focus of the bank’s fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up steadily in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue amid a worldwide boom in water-fueled electricity.   Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams, transmission lines and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank’s core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.   “Large hydro is a very big part of the solution for Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia. I fundamentally believe we have to be involved,” said Rachel Kyte, the bank’s vice president for sustainable development and an influential voice among Kim’s top staff members. The earlier move out of hydro “was the wrong message. That was then. This is now. We are back.”   It is a controversial stand. The bank backed out of large-scale hydropower because of the steep trade-offs involved. Big dams produce lots of cheap, clean electricity, but they often uproot villages in dam-flooded areas and destroy the livelihoods of the people the institution is supposed to help. A 2009 World Bank review of hydro¬power noted the “overwhelming environmental and social risks” that had to be addressed but also concluded that Africa and Asia’s vast and largely undeveloped hydropower potential was key to providing dependable electricity to the hundreds of millions of people who remain without it.   “What’s the one issue that’s holding back development in the poorest countries? It’s energy. There’s just no question,” Kim said in an interview.   Advocacy groups remain skeptical, arguing that large projects, such as Congo’s long-debated network of dams around Inga Falls, may be of more benefit to mining companies or industries in neighboring countries than poor communities.   “It is the old idea of a silver bullet that can modernize whole economies,” said Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers, a group that has organized opposition to the bank’s evolving hydro policy and argued for smaller projects designed around communities rather than mega-dams meant to export power throughout a region.   “Turning back to hydro is being anything but a progressive climate bank,” said Justin Guay, a Sierra Club spokesman on climate and energy issues. “There needs to be a clear shift from large, centralized projects.”   The major nations that support the World Bank, however, have been pushing it to identify such projects — complex undertakings that might happen only if an international organization is involved in sorting out the financing, overseeing the performance and navigating the politics.   The move toward big hydro comes amid Kim’s stark warning that global warming will leave the next generation with an “unrecognizable planet.” That dire prediction, however, has left him struggling to determine how best to respond and frustrated by some of the bank’s inherent limitations.   In his speeches, Kim talks passionately about the bank’s ability to “catalyze” and “leverage” the world to action by mobilizing money and ideas, and he says he is hunting for ideas “equal to the challenge” of curbing carbon use. He has criticized the “small bore” thinking that he says has hobbled progress on the issue.   However, the bank remains in the business of financing traditional fossil-fuel plants, including those that use the dirtiest form of coal, as well as cleaner but ¬carbon-based natural gas infrastructures.   Among the projects likely to cross Kim’s desk in coming months, for example, is a 600-megawatt power plant in Kosovo that would be fired by lignite coal, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to carbon emissions.   The plant has strong backing from the United States, the World Bank’s major shareholder. It also meshes with one of the bank’s other long-standing imperatives: Give countries what they ask for. The institution has 188 members to keep happy and can go only so far in trying to impose its judgment over that of local officials. Kim, who in his younger days demonstrated against World Bank-enforced “orthodoxy” in economic policy, now may be hard-pressed to enforce an energy orthodoxy of his own.   http://www.business-humanrights.org/ Visit the related web page
	400 Parts Per Million: Climate Milestone on the Road of Idiocy by George Monbiot Guardian News   May 2013   The only way forward is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm.   Reaching 400ppm.The data go back 800,000 years: that"s the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the preindustrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million (ppm). 400ppm is a figure that belongs to a different era.   It is symbolic of our failure to put the long-term prospects of the natural world and the people it supports above immediate self-interest. The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands. That requires, above all, that we leave the majority of the fossil fuels which have already been identified in the ground. There is not a government or an energy company which has yet agreed to do so.   Recently, Shell announced that it will go ahead with its plans to drill deeper than any offshore oil operation has gone before: almost 3km below the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, Oxford University opened a new laboratory in its department of earth sciences. The lab is funded by Shell. Oxford says that the partnership "is designed to support more effective development of natural resources to meet fast-growing global demand for energy." Which translates as finding and extracting even more fossil fuel.   The European Emissions Trading Scheme, which was supposed to have capped our consumption, is now, for practical purposes, dead. International climate talks have stalled; governments such as ours now seem quietly to be unpicking their domestic commitments. Practical measures to prevent the growth of global emissions are, by comparison to the scale of the challenge, almost nonexistent.   The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.   This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy. Without a widespread reform of campaign finance, lobbying and influence-peddling and the systematic corruption they promote, our chances of preventing climate breakdown are close to zero.   So here stands our political class at a waystation along the road of idiocy, apparently determined only to complete the journey.   December 2012   Break the grip of corporate power to secure our future.   Humankind"s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference.   The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite.   What they call "the market" looks more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich. Neoliberalism appears to be little more than a justification for plutocracy.   The doctrine was first applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman"s extreme prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet to impose a programme that would have been impossible in a democratic state. The result was an economic catastrophe, but one in which the rich – who took over Chile"s privatised industries and unprotected natural resources – prospered exceedingly.   The creed was taken up by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was forced upon the poor world by the IMF and the World Bank. By the time James Hansen presented the first detailed attempt to model future temperature rises to the US Senate in 1988, the doctrine was being implanted everywhere.   As we saw in 2007 and 2008 (when neoliberal governments were forced to abandon their principles to bail out the banks), there could scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for addressing a crisis of any kind. Until it has no choice, the self-hating state will not intervene, however acute the crisis or grave the consequences. Neoliberalism protects the interests of the elite against all-comers.   Preventing climate breakdown – the four, five or six degrees of warming now predicted for this century by green extremists like, er, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers – means confronting the oil, gas and coal industries. It means forcing those industries to abandon the four-fifths or more of fossil fuel reserves that we cannot afford to burn. It means cancelling the prospecting and development of new reserves – what"s the point if we can"t use current stocks? – and reversing the expansion of any infrastructure (such as airports) that cannot be run without them.   But the self-hating state cannot act. Captured by interests that democracy is supposed to restrain, it can only sit on the road, ears pricked and whiskers twitching, as the truck thunders towards it. Confrontation is forbidden, action is a mortal sin. You may, perhaps, disperse some money for new energy; you may not legislate against the old.   So Barack Obama pursues what he calls an "all of the above" policy: promoting wind, solar, oil and gas. Ed Davey, the British climate change secretary, launched an energy bill in the House of Commons last week whose purpose was to decarbonise the energy supply. In the same debate he also promised that he would "maximise the potential" of oil and gas production in the North Sea and other offshore fields.   Nicolas Stern described climate change as "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen". The useless Earth summit in June; the feeble measures now being debated in Doha; the energy bill and electricity-demand-reduction paper launched in Britain last week (better than they might have been, but unmatched to the scale of the problem) – all expose the greatest and widest-ranging failure of market fundamentalism: its incapacity to address our existential crisis.   The 1,000-year legacy of current carbon emissions is long enough to smash anything resembling human civilisation into splinters. Complex societies have sometimes survived the rise and fall of empires, plagues, wars and famines. They won"t survive six degrees of climate change, sustained for a millennium. In return for 150 years of explosive consumption, much of which does nothing to advance human welfare, we are atomising the natural world and the human systems that depend on it.   The climate summit (or foothill) in Doha and the sound and fury of the British government"s new measures probe the current limits of political action. Go further and you break your covenant with power, a covenant both disguised and validated by the neoliberal creed.   Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives.   In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises that now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy. This should start with an effort to reform campaign finance – the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies and politicians.   We must start to articulate a new politics, one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a few favoured industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us, not just the super-rich.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/commentisfree+content/video Visit the related web page
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